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Uncommon Knowledge: Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution
Based on new evidence and knowledge that functioning proteins are extremely rare, should Darwin’s theory of evolution be dismissed, dissected, developed or replaced with a theory of intelligent design?
Has Darwinism really failed? I discuss it with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer, who have raised doubts about Darwin’s theory in their two books and essay, respectively The Deniable Darwin, Darwin’s Doubt, and “Giving Up Darwin” (published in the Claremont Review of Books).
Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Fiesole, Italy
Published in General
Shawn,
This isn’t a fair characterization of ID. The equations come from forensics, where one is looking for a real human intelligent actor in the raw physical data. Also, the equations have been applied to look down satelite’s that photograph a large area looking for military and other manmade objects. A computer program based on the equations can pick out with accuracy the man-made objects which then can be intensely studied.
The point that I’m making is that we can discern that which looks like intelligent design v. that which looks like a natural result with high accuracy. If we then subject some of the evolutionary arguments to this analysis they look much more like intelligent design than natural results. Thus we find the proposed evolutionary hypothetical sequence very uncredible. This is purely an objective evaluation and evolutionary biologists should be subjecting their hypotheses to this kind of analysis without complaint.
Back to Darwin and the original subject matter. Again Darwin’s hypothesis as stated in the Origin of the Species did not conform to the data when it was presented. He said that the confirming data would be found. It was not found. All I suggest is that the extreme reverence for Darwin as a scientist must be withdrawn. Teaching Darwin as the foundational work of evolutionary biology should also be withdrawn. One can go back farther and find evolutionary theory hundreds and even thousands of years before Darwin so simply focusing on the idea also gives a false impression.
Darwin is a cultural figure for sure. Giving him a short essay describing his impact in the middle to late 19th century would be something that every biology textbook could easily accommodate. Refusing to make these changes seems very odd and out of the scientific character. That kind of intransigence is characteristic of ideology, not science.
Regards,
Jim
It’s not ignored – your objection is simply non sequitur. As a means of demonstrating to you that this isn’t simply atheist mulishness or obtuseness I would point out that Mr Gawron – who is a Jew – doesn’t accept your special pleading either and for largely the same reasons I don’t.
Either there is one method of assessing empirical claims of this type or there is not: proposing that the laws of physics are suspended requires a truly impressive set of proofs in order to be taken seriously. These historical claims are extraordinary for all the reasons we’ve previously discussed but lack the similarly impressive proofs.
Matthew 27:52 is still there pointing at you and attempting to figure out why you can’t understand the difference between it and Socrates… Or the difference between it and the other synoptic Gospels, for that matter.
Why is it a non sequitur? Do you think practical consequences don’t affect the standards of evidence? If so, then you must not like that particular atheist response.
That would certainly fit your profile.
In fact, now that I think of it, probably the real runner-up answer is your repeatedly failed attempt to establish epistemic parity between the Gospel testimony and this or that outlandish testimony. Do we need to go over that one again?
I don’t recall ever discussing this topic with
Chancellor GowronMr. Gawron. (At least we agree on a lot of Kant!)As I keep saying, the whole point of everything I’ve ever said around here about any of this stuff is to avoid special pleading and to treat like claims as like. I don’t understand why you keep misunderstanding me in this way.
I believe we agree.
An interesting conclusion; do you have a premise for it? (My premises against it are still hanging around.)
If we’ve talked about this one before, it’s slipped my memory; I remember @Larry3435 on the subject. (See my response at # 234 of “What My Students Said about Religion and Science,” after missing the answer on the previous page of comments.)
What exactly is your objection here? Are you reusing Larry’s old objection? Or just reiterating–as if I needed the reminder–that the Bible reports miraculous events?
My objection is that in essence every statement that you make when it comes to your faith being justified by biblical statements is comprised of nothing more than fancy word games that logicians use to fool children and old people. Such objections can be used similarly to prove such absurdities as the book of Mormons claims or even Scientology. The venerable nature of Christian dogma doesn’t make it more believable in an of itself. if that were the case then Buddhism or Hinduism would have equal or greater claims to credibility than Christianity.
To continue, you haven’t any solid evidence for any of the claims that you’re making; there are no artifacts, no independent corroboration that would actually allow you to solidly claim the things on offer did actually happen. Take the events in Matthew that I mentioned above.
The gospel of Matthew claims that after Jesus’s death by crucifixion the dead walked around Jerusalem, the sun was blotted out and there was an earthquake. Why don’t the other gospels discuss these events? You might say they just left them out because, you know, they weren’t there to see it… But that’s essentially true of all the gospel authors. All of these accounts were handed down many decades after the events which reported and are discordant on many of the critical events that are supposedly depicted. Critically, the existence of the zombie apocalypse narrative in Jerusalem really manages to cast doubt on the veracity of the entire narrative. If we can’t trust that which parts of it can we actually trust?
Your credulousness despite these discrepancies is what generally irritates me the most about this sort of discussion. That and the fact that you seek special exemption for your own peculiar Faith which you would never grant to other faiths if the shoe were on the other foot. Behind every apparent double standard lies and unconfessed single standard.
Surely you understand that I’m genuinely not interested in picking on Christianity just for its own sake. My beef is with all such fuzzy thinking.
[Content reorganized and moved elsewhere.]
So we return to your favorite objection.
I keep linking and linking to the relevant aspects of the biblical testimony. I’ve been admitting to you, again and again for years, that, if you can show me that the same things turn up in these other testimonies, I shall have to change my religion!
I believe it was # 184 of “A Conversation about the Bible” which showed the first welcome glimmer of interest on your part in engaging the logic.
Alas! The last glimmer appears to be # 222 of the same thread.
My replies in #s 206-213 and # 234 refuted you on the subject, and I don’t believe you’ve said a word about it since.
I already answered this objection; see above. Why not consider my response before repeating yourself again?
(I may have left out of that earlier response a reminder that testimony itself counts as evidence; Ricochet’s @CatoRand is correct on the subject; see his remarks to you at # 101 of “Knowledge and Faith Can Be the Same Thing.”)
What sort of answer would that be? Do you think you’re talking to some liberal heretic?
If you want my answer, you may consult # 234 of “What My Students Said about Religion and Science.”
By “discordant” do you mean they don’t all mention all and exactly the same things? What sort of a standard is that? No two witnesses to an event report all and only the same details.
Or do you mean they are contradictory? Skeptics are always talking about contradictions in the Bible, but I’ve never yet known them to mention any good examples. Perhaps you have one in mind?
Resurrection is NOT the same thing as zombification.
I trust that part, like the rest of it.
Do you have some reason I shouldn’t? Preferably one I’ve not already rebutted?
A serious accusation.
Do you have any evidence for it?
I wish you would stop accusing me without evidence of what I have been explicitly denying for years.
Do you really misunderstand me so badly every time I say this?
Or do you actually consider me a liar? If so, I wish you would say so directly so we could deal with it and move on with our lives.
Or maybe you think there is evidence for your accusation just because you’ve pointed out that there are extraordinary claims in the Gospels, and yet I believe; or because you’ve pointed out that the Gospels don’t say all and only the same things, and yet I believe; yet I do not believe the testimony of Joseph Smith.
My dear Sir, that is no evidence for your accusation!
I grant that it could at first glance appear to be evidence for me having a double standard.
However, I have meticulously laid out the reasons it is not. And–as documented in # 38 of this thread–you have a long track record of ignoring these reasons. That’s not me having a double standard; that’s you doing a lousy job with the logic.
I confess my standard! It’s logic and evidence as well as I can understand it!
I point again and again to a good chunk of the logic, and it takes you more than three years to show the slightest interest in it! You then wait another 8 months, while continuing to ignore the logic, and then accuse me without evidence of heaven knows what sort of hypocrisy, illogic, or dishonesty!
Mine is with your fuzzy thinking, not so much you personally (who have joined any number of Ricocheti on my prayer lists these last past years).
Perhaps the problem here is that you refuse to concede that your appeal to logic isn’t fact-based.
So long as you are capable of putting on sufficiently long stilts you can indeed ford deep waters… but that doesn’t in fact make you a stork. This is the nature of our disagreement. I find your logic to be inherently flawed because it is an appeal to words not an appeal to facts which you concede (by your continual appeal to words) you have precious few of.
Words – such as the Bible and claims made in the Gospels – are not facts no matter what justifications you place on them because the claims which set the Bible apart from otherwise similar claims about Socrates are that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are entirely mundane in terms of the things which supposedly transpired. The Bible and Gospel claims are anything but.
So – While I concede provisionally (for instance) that a person named “Socrates” may have existed in fact… we have very little in the way of indisputable facts to confirm this provisional concession. There are no coins, tomb, bones, or autographed manuscripts from Socrates which we could definitively point to along with a constellation of other facts establishing his existence.
The point is that the existence or non-existence in fact of Socrates actually doesn’t really matter as much as the idea of Socrates and his annoying habit of asking questions. Even if it were definitively proven that Socrates didn’t exist (a logical impossibility) we would still call this method “Socratic.”
This boundary of epistemic humility surrounding Socrates – who exists in a sort of Schroedinger’s box, simultaneously existing in our minds as an idea and not existing in the real world via indisputable proof – ought to be the same boundary which surrounds the claims of the Gospels. That is, if we were treating them the same. You cannot extract facts from the proposed text – and not to the level of certitude you assert.
The example of Matthew and the Earthquake/Sun outage/Zombie apocalypse is very telling: these are claims which have a testable nature. They either happened or they didn’t. If they did, you’d think other people than the Author of Matthew (not actually Matthew) would have noticed these momentous events and transcribed them in their gospels which purport to depict the same things. They do not.
This omission is a serious contradiction – again, precisely because of the spectacular nature of the claims made. There could be other sources of corroboration, such as testimony from the Imperial Roman authorities or from the Jewish authorities themselves in the same time… sadly, these do not exist either. Which of the other fantastic claims should we similarly question on the basis of lack of corroboration?
Thus, in order for those claims to be true you are essentially positing a conspiracy theory: That every other literate observer in that area either implicitly or explicitly chose to ignore or suppress these fantastic goings-on in order to advance their anti-Jesus agenda. Either that or they simply didn’t happen and Matthew’s author was a fabulist who was copying most of his work from another, extant Gospel and actually saw none of the things supposedly reported.
I prefer a simpler test: you could merely apply Hitchens’ Razor and recognize that assertions made without evidence can be rejected on the same basis. For all intents and purposes Socrates didn’t exist. That doesn’t mean that the idea of Socrates is therefore unimportant.
Indeed; I truly thank heaven we agree on that!
Except that, again, there is no zombie narrative in the NT. There are resurrection narratives.
(I’ll probably say more in the morning. I’ll sleep better if I save my comment drafts till then and don’t have as many replies coming in! They’ll probably read better, too, if I proof them on the morrow. Good night!)
Maybe not; I don’t care. You’re trying to change the subject.
There are facts about Socrates, and we can know them. Are you denying that?
You really are, aren’t you? You’re joining @HeavyWater (page 6 of “Jesus, the Trinity, and the NT Manuscripts) and @TomMeyer (# 193 of “K and F Can Be the Same Thing”) in saying that we don’t know anything about Socrates!
This is weird. I’m not at all sure I have any idea what you’re talking about.
I appeal to facts. Words are a tool for referring to them, and I’m not referring to any word in itself. (Save the Word of G-d, who became a man, etc.; see John 1!).
If you think I’m appealing to words rather than facts, why don’t you link or quote me to that effect? (Meanwhile, here’s another link to a place where I appeal to facts.)
I don’t follow. Are you saying that when I talk about Socrates I’m not talking about facts? (Like I said to @HeavyWater at # 298 of “Jesus, the Trinity, and the NT Manuscripts,” when we study Socrates we are studying the facts of history.)
My assertions concern the reasonably high probability with which we know everything we know about ancient history–if you call that “certitude.”
I am treating them the same. There are facts about both–knowable facts, facts known through testimony, testimony which can be assessed according to criteria which indicate a higher or lower degree of reliability.
I answered this objection at # 234 of “What My Students Said about Religion and Science.” These are minor sideshows in comparison to the momentous events, on which the witnesses are in dramatic agreement both in emphasizing them and in reporting consistent and overlapping details.
See # 220 of “What My Students Said about Religion and Science”: The exception is when anything gets recorded at all. Over 99.99% of ancient people and events are not recorded by anyone. This is normal.
It is also a mistake to count the NT testimonies as one; they were gathered together, but they are distinct testimonies; if you want corroboration, Paul corroborates Luke, both corroborate John, and so on.
Even apart from archaeology and the occasional non-biblical ancient text corroborating this or that detail from the New Testament–such texts do exist, you know–the Resurrection of the Messiah is better corroborated than anything we know about Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, or Confucius.
I apply it all the time–for example, to your absurd accusation against me in # 36!
(Sidenote: The rule does not apply to properly basic beliefs, or first principles; but don’t get me started on Plantinga!)
You still don’t seem to grasp what @CatoRand tried to explain to you before: Eyewitness testimony is evidence, although whether it is weighty evidence is a separate question. (See # 101 of “Knowledge and Faith Can Be the Same Thing.”)
Nothing of the sort. It’s a case of different witnesses not listing all the same things.
Do you call it a contradiction when I say the guy at the train station was singing to a stringed instrument and my wife only mentions that he was singing?
Such, plainly, is your assertion that there are contradictions in the Gospel testimony. Or perhaps you have some real evidence forthcoming?
You are extracting a pound of truth from an ounce of lawyerly wisdom, to put it kindly.
It is also the weakest possible form of evidence – particularly when separated from the events in question by decades… and based upon what can only be assumed to be corrupted and incomplete source material, copied from previous documents which no longer exist for us to examine and authored by anonymous persons who didn’t actually see the events in question.
You propose to construct an entire worldview out of this tottering tower of teleological trash and expect that we should revere it. Surely, you grasp why people are appropriately incredulous about it, particularly given your understandable skepticism about things like Joseph Smith?
The trouble is: there is no evidence, so you would have to go back a step further before even granting the premise laid down by the Gospels and ask: does any of this make sense on any level? It makes about as much sense as the epic of Gilgamesh, which is to say when you put it in the proper cultural context (a primitive, superstitious society where death by mysterious disease, poor dental health or childbirth stalked daily life as a shadow) it is the exact sort of story you would expect such people to tell.
The fallacy of modern history is frequently to look at ancient history with a set of anachronistic modern values and condemn the past on that basis. The fallacy that religious historians and theologians make (it seems) is to ignore the milieu in which these fantastic events supposedly took place and the fundamental credulity of the people involved who laid these accounts down. They believed all manner of things which are simply untrue. Add this to the heap of such things and be done. Accept that the idea of Jesus may be far more important than playing fancy word games in an effort to prove that these scratchings have more meaning and import than they do.
Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence, Auggie. No cross? No nails? No dice.
Except for the fact that in this case they neglected to notice the dead people wandering around the whole city.
No big deal at all!
To the contrary, you are committing the fallacy Lewis called “chronological snobbery”: You are assuming that ancient people are irrational, gullible, superstitious, inattentive to standards of evidence.
Like I’ve said before (e.g., # 236 of “Is Christianity Being Rejected [Etc.]”), I have found quite as much rationality, incredulity, and attention to evidence in Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Paul, Thomas, and Augustine as in modern universities in America and Asia.
Hey, I actually like a good Ockham’s Razor argument against my religion. Very respectable reasoning.
William James has some marvelous counterarguments which I like even more, but so what?
You’re committing the fallacy of begging the question–arguing by assuming your own position on the question under dispute.
I say there is evidence. What is under dispute is the premise to your Ockham’s Razor argument.
Just like modern skeptics. How interesting!
But why attack ancients or moderns on these grounds? Why not examine the evidence for or against their views?
Yes, plenty of sense. Especially on the level of the Torah and the Psalms and Prophets–the proper context for understanding the New Testament.
But even on the level of Kant, Plato, or Confucius there’s a whole lot of sense to the Gospel.
So you admit that # 44’s “without evidence” remark is false. Good.
Hypothetically, so what? All I’m really going for is epistemic parity: treat like claims as like, and treat different claims according to their differences.
I know some things on testimonial evidence alone concerning, for example, Socrates. So testimonial evidence all by itself can be enough for knowledge.
The only differences are (1) that I need a somewhat higher standard of evidence for an extraordinary claim like the Resurrection, and (2) that I have much, much, much better testimonial evidence which is also bolstered by some archaeology and so on.
(And [3], following James, I think we need somewhat less evidence given the possible consequences! Given your # 32, you apparently don’t agree. That’s fine. I don’t rely on this difference!)
I honestly don’t.
Please attend to the facts noted in # 159 of “K and F Can Be the Same Thing” and # 234 of “A Conversation on the B.” The Gospel testimony is very different from Smith’s.
We have as many as eleven (or more) indicators of reliable historical testimony in the case of the Gospel witnesses.
You keep saying that the Smith testimony and the Gospel testimony are in the same boat. But you’ve only been able to point out that one or two of these indicators are there for the Smith testimony. Those one or two indicators are probably not enough to warrant an extraordinary claim like that, and in any case they are much less than the Gospel has.
You missed something important in # 29. All this is only “one of the major lines of evidence–not by any means the only.”
So . . . no. You do not know of any contradictions in the Gospels?
Interestingly, here you manage to contradict yourself.
Ok, so contradiction there either.
And no–not a big deal at all. Repeating myself from # 48 here (and from # 234 to Larry some years ago in “K and F Can Be the Same Thing”), these are minor sideshows in comparison to the momentous events, on which the witnesses are in dramatic agreement both in emphasizing said events and in reporting consistent and overlapping details.
Would you like me to explain why I actually consider many holy people being resurrected as a mere sideshow to the death and Resurrection of the Messiah?
Oh god, not this again. My ears were burning.